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Christoph Emmrich, Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies, engages with fields as diverse as Newar Buddhism, Pali and Burmese literature and Tamil Jainism. He has recently been working on and with Newar girls and young women in the Kathmandu Valley (Nepal) studying their involvement in Buddhist practices related to marriage, image consecration, temporary ordination and female education. In this particular project he confronts the personal and ethnographic remembrance of singular religious events with the history of their local and academic exegesis and contrasts both with the prescriptive/descriptive literary history of ritual manuals in Newar and Sanskrit reaching back to the early 17th century. Christoph Emmrich’s doctoral work dealt with expressions denoting time in Pāli canonical literature. He further works on the literary representation of Buddhist monastic networks, lineage and travel between Nepal, Yangon and Mawlamyine (Burma) as well as on the historiography of Tamil Digambara Jain temple ritual in North and South Arcot (Tamil Nadu, India) addressing questions of assimilation and resistance.

Chair of the University of Toronto/McMaster University Yehan Numata Program in Buddhist Studies